Update because it's been a minute. I've gotten my computer system and language pretty nailed down, so I've started focusing on some worldbuilding to establish the trade ports for Space Terminal.

First pass has been Lunar surface - part of which has been establishing the who as much as the what.

More screenshots of hex editor. Today it's my virtual disk media. Elsewhere in my virtual hardware I've taken lots of liberties - for disks, I'm modelling off the original North Star 5.25" hard sectored floppy - retrocmp.de/northstar-hr...

Lots of bugfixing and polish over the weekend. And now onto this - compiled byte code.

As FRL (Frontier Runtime Language) Caterplr is 8,448 bytes - slightly less if I trimmed whitespace and comments.

As FRX (Frontier Runtime Executable) it's just 2,289 bytes.

Which makes big difference...

Setting aside the bug in rendering the final scoreboard - this actually feels pretty momentous. The game certainly isn't original - but it's built using:

- A language I cooked up
- Emulated hardware I designed and virtualised

And it WORKS.

#gamedev #vintagecomputing

Not sure if this will stick around for the final version, but it's kind of fun to see how far I can push without proper arithmetic/logical operators. #gamedev

Kind of boring stuff today, but here goes.

Because everything is a pipeline, that means execution is a pipeline:

KBD1: | EXEC /POLARCAT | TRM1:

That's the command in my boot script that runs the command shell, and it basically says "read input from Keyboard, send output to Terminal 1.

Today, I spent in inordinate amount of time getting a score to display with padded zeroes. #gamedev

Not necessary in any way, but somehow woven into the DNA of everything in the '80s.

Designing a new shell/programming language has been a weirdly fascinating process. #gamedev #vintagecomputing

The questions I ask are:

- Will a player enjoy interacting with this?
- Does it feel like 1983?
- Is it consistent/idiomatic?
- Can it be bent and broken?

My approach to building the eponymous Space Terminal is... indirect. Rather than just starting with what I want the player to interact with, I'm prioritising an authentic feel of an imperfect device that has been iterated on and built out over time.

I'm generating layers of tech sediment.

In the Space Terminal timeline, microcomputers stopped being a thing in the mid 1970s - at least for the "Western" market. Intel, Motorola, Zilog, MOS Tech, etc. all pivoted. Think of it as their version of our DRAM apocalypse.

The player is given a North Star Frontier - a word processor.

Hi 0xFFFF.

Fathers' Day 2026 seems like a good place to start this. Here are the humble beginnings of Space Terminal.